Taking inspiration from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, this book elucidates the theory and practice of a selected group of key Japanese architects by situating them within a wider cultural context of art, technology, literature, and politics. Illustrated with rarely seen images and interspersed with previously untranslated texts, the book uses biographical profiles and comparative analyses to trace the evolution of spatial, aesthetic, and behavioral concepts in Japanese architecture over the postwar decades. In particular, the political activism of architects in the 1960s and the social criticism of architects in the 1970s provide a vital source of inspiration for the protean creativity of the Japanese architectural world today.

Thomas Daniell is head of the Department of Architecture and Design at the University of St. Joseph in Macau, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He holds a BArch from Victoria University of Wellington, an MEng from Kyoto University, and a PhD from RMIT University, for which he received the Vice Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Thesis in a Higher Degree by Research. Widely published, he is author of FOBA: Buildings (2005), After the Crash: Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan (2008), Houses and Gardens of Kyoto (2010), and Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama + Amorphe (2011), as well as editor of Toyo Ito's Tarzans in the Media Forest (2011).